Richmond City Council Election 2012: Nat Bates

Richmond Councilman Nat Bates is running for reelection on November 6. Bates won his first seat in 1967. Photo - Tawanda Kanhema/Richmond Confidential

In the summer of 1975, Richmond Councilman Nat Bates received a call from Ben Brown, a Democratic campaign organizer in Atlanta. Brown needed Bates’ support rallying African American voters behind his candidate, Jimmy Carter, a little known peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia who had just finished his term as governor and was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Bates was split. Back in California, incumbent governor Jerry Brown was also running for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Richmond councilmembers were trying to secure funding for the San Rafael bridge extension from Governor Brown’s office in Sacramento.

“I said ‘Ben, you can’t be real, this country isn’t going to vote for no peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia,’” Bates said, chuckling while reclining his massive frame into his chair at the Richmond Civic Center, as if to recant his prediction. “Ben said, ‘Well, we think he can win.’ So I said, ‘Well, my governor Jerry Brown is running for president too, and I don’t wanna alienate him because we’ve got to go to Sacramento to try and get funding for the city of Richmond.’”

Following Carter’s surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses in 1976, Bates joined the Carter campaign and helped mobilize voters behind the Democratic candidate. As soon as Carter won the presidential election, Bates joined a team led by former Assemblymember John T. Knox to the White House, where they explained the need for funding to extend the San Rafael Bridge.

“The road from San Rafael stopped cars for such a long time that people would get out of their cars, go and buy a drink from a nearby store and come back to find traffic still stalled,” Bates said. “We walked away with 95 percent of the funding we needed for the San Rafael bridge extension and Sacramento gave us the other five percent.”

Bates, 80, is the only one among the 11 candidates running for office in Richmond who can recall service going back to the late 1960s — at which time he had already served a longer term on the council than most of the current members have in their current terms. This has enabled him to cultivate support within the business community, primarily with Chevron, which has been in Richmond since 1910.